Even before the proliferation of distributed computing and the rise of the cloud, the ability to form groups of computing elements has been central to computing. These groups may share data and computing resources, and grouping is a common technique in the pursuit of the flexible reapportioning of resources. On demand provisioning holds the promise of greater resource availability and reduced idle time. However, current methods of group management require significant overhead, and seamless transparency has not yet been achieved.
Some of this overhead is devoted to securing communications between group members. Many practices for grouping resources devote time and cycles to exchanging information used to verify the identities of group members and to secure communications between the members. To direct this exchange, in some communications architectures, one or more group members are granted group management authority. This managing entity maintains a list of group membership and oversees the exchange of public cryptographic information including cryptographic keys and security certificates. Should the authority be transferred, the process of designating a new managing entity often triggers a furious exchange of data within the group. This hand-off becomes increasingly burdensome as group size increases. Compounding the problem, group members that lose contact with the group may miss the exchange and remain unaware of the transfer of authority. Thus, while conventional group management techniques have been generally adequate, limitations remain.